DinaMy lace class is making a group entry for the Lace Guild's "Myth & Mystery" competition and our piece is a freestanding totem pole.
Can any of our Canadian spiders tell me if the First Nations use symbols for
earth, air, fire and water which would be used on totem poles and if so what
they are, as I've looked on the net but can't find anything (maybe I'm
looking in the wrong places) and our local UK library is not into things
Canadian.
Back in 1995 The Lace Guild/John Bull Trophy exhibition's theme was 'The Elements and around that time I found a 2nd hand book by Adrian Frutiger "Signs & Symbols". This is what he has to say about Pre-Columbian American scripts:
"The examples of the script cultures of the new World so far discovered are few in comparison to those of 'old Europe' and about 4,000 years less ancient.
From the Incas, only the preliminary stages of script formation are known in the form of knotted strings, whereas teh Aztecs and the Mayas from the region of present-day Mexico have left fascinating examples of scripts.
The autonomous culture of Central America was suddenly and cruelly interrupted in the course of its development by the conquests of the Spanish colonists. At this time the script was half way between the pictorial and the phoetic....."
That, plus three pages on Aztec and Maya scripts are the only references to the Americas in a book of 660 pages.
However, it seems that most ideas of earth, wind, fire, and water as the elements goes back to ancient Greece; and there are two sets of symbols, as used in mediaeval Britain:
fire: triangle with horizontal base
water: inverted triangle with horizontal side at top
air: like fire with horizontal dividing line
earth: like water with horizontal dividing line
world: two superimposed triangles (star of David)
fire: circle
water: circle divided in half horizontally
air: circle with small square in the middle
earth: circle divided into four by horizontal & perpendicular lines (upright cross)
world: circle with small cross on top (upside down version of female)
Sorry it's not really related to Canadian First Nations. Brenda
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